proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING

are commonly associated with high cultural context such as participant preference to withhold personal
opinions during F2F situations; and (4) To enhance the student’s cross-cultural learning experience.
AOD and our research experience
Using one of our courses, MBA Business Ethics, which was taught in the classroom by Dr. Wulf
in 2005 and supervised online by Dr. Pence, we examine the learning outcomes evidenced in the course’s
online discussion forums. The MBA students in this class were typical of those we continue to have
enrolled in our current classes in Europe and the USA. Predominantly from high context cultures, there
were twice as many females as males enrolled. Typically, students were in their mid-twenties with some
prior working experience. Interestingly, the countries represented in this class covered all of the major
continents with the exception of Antarctica. Few students knew each other before entering the MBA
program; however, most have remained in contact as evidenced by their Facebook and LinkedIn pages.
In Paris in 2005, electronic learning management systems as well as the necessary technological
infrastructure were readily available to our MBA students. This gave us the opportunity to develop
extensions of the classroom through virtual activities. Classes met once a week for 11 weeks with a total of
33 hours of in-class work per course. Online work in each class added an additional two-three hours per
week to the required class work. The online discussion forum was imposed upon this class, initially as a
way to engage the learner when outside of the classroom. Given that Paris is a city with many activities to
distract from academic concentration, the use of online forums permitted the student to stay engaged at his
own pace and in his own time frame. The only obligation made upon the student was to participate at least
twice per week in the online forum. This accounted for 30% of the final course grade.
Using this hybrid learning approach, the course objective was for students to discover each other’s
distinct view point regarding business ethics, thereby educating each other about their different personal,
cultural and moral value sets. The discussion forum consisted of four different ethical dilemmas (see
Appendix): (1) corruption in the airline industry; (2) escalation of interpersonal conflicts in a small
publishing company; (3) loyalty towards one’s friend in a tough-going economy; (4) whistle blowing in the
workplace. Each mini-case contained a cliff-hanger, which required student resolution. Hooked by these
scenarios, students interacted with apparent ease on the forum. There was no evident need for the
instructors to guide the discussion or to interfere with their opinions and suggestions. In fact, we chose not
to participate with our students’ discussion threads. By removing ourselves from the conversation, students
discovered themselves via the forums without the distraction of feeling the need to respond to the power
position of the professor. Eventually we guided in-class debates, but we left it up to the students to figure
out, when they were online, what they wanted to say.
From a clinical perspective, we can evaluate the evolution of cultural awareness as it leads toward
individual and group consensus. Documenting this learning process gives us a better understanding of the
significance of the cultural contexts in communication and therefore about the acquisition of certain
competencies, which are useful outside of the classroom. It is important to note that only one of the student
participants was a native English language speaker. All of the others were at differing levels of English
language competency, though they did communicate in the written language with more facility than in
verbal communication. The in-class and online forums were conducted exclusively in English.
Analysis of AOD within our MBA Ethics course
Each of the discussion forums was analyzed according to the following five criteria: (1) Starting
position in the discussion forum (early, middle, late); (2) Explanation of point of view (no, yes); (3)
Responsiveness to a an individual or group of individuals’ threads (no, yes); (4) Expressed opinion to the
ethical issue (none, against, for); (5) Length of individual response threads (low 1-5 lines, medium 6-10
lines, long 11+ lines). The resulting conclusions are illustrated in the following tables:
Conference proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING overcome barriers of Life-Long learning?” 191